Celebrating Multilingualism Day at the EP – where 24 languages meet

This article is brought to you in association with the European Parliament.

The European Parliament is organising an Online Multilingualism Day to celebrate one of the EU’s core values that ensures Parliament is accessible and transparent.

The Online Multilingualism Day 2020 events will take place on Saturday 26 September from 10.00 to 16.30 CET. Talks and panels will be broadcast live from the Brussels plenary chamber and online workshops will give citizens the opportunity to peak behind the curtain and see how the European Parliament works in 24 languages.

The programme also allows the public to follow a day in the life of a translator and an interpreter, to connect to the Luxembourg campus to learn about translation traineeships, as well as to connect to the House of European History for snapshots of linguistic diversity throughout history.

The Multilingualism Day will close with a live panel from the Brussels plenary chamber discussing what it takes to make multilingualism a reality.

The panellists:

• Nicola Beer (Renew, DE) – Vice-President of the European Parliament.

• Sven Gatz – Brussels Minister of Finance, Budget, Civil Service and Promotion of Multilingualism.
• Jaume Duch Guillot – EP Spokesperson and Director-General for Communication.
• Agnieszka Walter-Drop – EP Director-General for Logistics and Interpretation for Conferences.
• Valter Mavrič – EP Director-General for Translation.

See the full schedule of the Online Multilingualism Day 2020 here.

Interpretation will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Polish and Spanish.

In parallel to the main programme, free translation workshops will be held in Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Irish, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish and Slovene throughout the day, run by experienced EP translators and interpreters.

Please register for workshops in advance, as they are limited to small groups, on a first-come, first-served basis.

Background

With 24 official languages, there are 552 possible language combinations at the European Parliament.

This is the fourth edition of Multilingualism Day, celebrated for the first time at the European Parliament on 30 September 2017. The event coincides with the European Day of Languages on 26 September and the International Translation Day on 30 September.

Multilingualism is one of the European Union’s core values, ensuring that all EU citizens can follow the work of their democratic representatives in any of the EU’s official languages.